The Center, founded in 1985, is an environmental organization dedicated to protecting the environment, enhancing human, animal and plant ecologies, promoting the efficient use of natural resources and expanding participation in the environmental movement.

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Center Supports President Obama On Clean Coal CCS

The Center for Environment, Commerce & Energy supports President Obama's Comprehensive Federal Strategy on Carbon Capture and Storage. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal and it makes no sense to not use it. Our challenge is to use it in a more environmentally friendly way. President Obama is aggressively pursuing this challenge and not only do we support his strategy, we have our own recommendation for him to consider.

President Obama states in his Memorandum on the CCS Strategy:

To further this work and develop a comprehensive and coordinated Federal strategy to speed the commercial development and deployment of clean coal technologies, I hereby establish an Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage (Task Force). You shall each designate a senior official from your respective agency to serve on the Task Force, which shall be Co Chaired by the designees from the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Task Force shall develop within 180 days of the date of this memorandum a proposed plan to overcome the barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with a goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects online by 2016. The plan should explore incentives for commercial CCS adoption and address any financial, economic, technological, legal, institutional, social, or other barriers to deployment.

The Center is promoting Energy Defense Reservations (EDR) as a multifaceted approach to CCS. We believe such facilities would significantly complement any sequestration approach. Morever, EDR makes carbon dioxide a valuable commodity--transportation fuel. In addition to utilizing oxycombustion for more efficient electricity production, EDR produces hydrogen for fuel cell production. Converting CO2 to gasoline is very expensive and that is part of the reason we include the Department of Defense (DOD) in the process. There are national security implications to climate change and DOD acknowledges this reality. As such, we recommend that the president add DOD to the Task Force.